I am not sure how you typically set up your online conferences, but this one came across my desk and I wanted to share. Most of them seem to be floating around the $59 mark with access to the presentations, handouts, and discussion.
I was browsing through the list of top EdWeek articles Steve mentioned in another post and noticed EdWeek has run a restart "Summit" already and has two more on the calendar.
Might be useful to look at how they are planning their events when developing The Indispensable Teacher event? Actual event format has some combination of presentation and moderated peer to peer conversations depending on which event you peruse... a lot of vendors in the mix ... familiar topics.
I like Rebecca's idea of smaller groups. It could be organized in many different ways, which raises questions about tags and categories. Some examples:
First and second-grade teachers
Teachers beginning their careers; teachers thinking about ending their careers
Teachers in upscale districts, low income districts
Urban, rural, suburban
Teachers working in states with bad COVID spread
Teachers working in states with mild COVID spread
Teachers in schools where administrators are doing a wonderful job
Teachers in schools where administrators are hopeless to the point of dangerous
Teachers in loving, supportive environments
Teachers in unloving, nonsupportive environments
Teachers whose lives are now completely out of control (who cry every night, never sleep, cannot cope, are ready to leap out the nearest window, etc.)
Teachers who are going to get through this and want to help others do the same
Set it up so that people have the chance to be in smaller cohorts and groups that act as support throughout the year:
1- Homeschooling teachings/Micro school teachers
2- In-person teachers
3- Hybrid teachers
4- Full Remote Learning teacher
For example, these are people that they can e-mail and share phone numbers. Create text groups. and then come back to the larger group and share their experiences so everyone is seeing different perspective and coming up with the ideas of education that are essential.
I think people use Facebook for this because it's so easy to do an so universal. We can easily set this up in Learning Revolution--what do we have that Facebook doesn't? What would make it worth coming here? Would it be the ability to schedule Zoom meetups for the support groups?
People who are invested in the topic and who I'd be comfortable sharing personal information with then I would in a more public forum. Having some basic format that Learning Revolution would create with EXPERT and vetted advice based on research and data, not just "Sally from Oklahoma".
Also, Facebook "groups" sometimes feels like an echo chamber. You can find anything that supports your ideas. I would hope these groups would CHALLENGE people to think positively and differently with the hopes of change for the better.
Guided topics each month so people can bring research and perspective.
Yesterday, I wrote a summary analysis of the cohorts involved in our education system and came to the (not surprising) conclusion that there is no viable path for COVID-and-post success outside of the student-teacher relationship. Not the parents (who are not teachers, and cannot be expected to change that reality), not the school administrators (who must support the status quo in the midst of very complicated funding and governance relationships), and not the community (which is too vast, too disorganized, and too fragmented to bring about substantive, broad-based change). The key stakeholders are the students (who have ample time and curiosity, no love for much of curriculum, and for half of them, means to explore on their own via technology), and the teachers (who chose this career, and may be pleased by newfound freedom and dismissal of tests and other bothersome confections). So: it's all about the student-teacher relationship, the core of learning, the indispensible teacher, and building this parallel path so (a) it works for everyone, not just the fortunate and (b) we have something useful after the schools are unable to fulfill their mandate given their current tools, rules and resources.
Steve Hargadon > Howard BlumenthalJuly 17, 2020 at 9:25am
There's an often-quoted conception in the homeschool world that it takes most students one month for each year of standard schooling to become accustomed to being in charge of their own education. Which is to say, the effects of conformity and having others direct you take a fair amount of time to recover from.
So this is where I take issue with your student-led change concept. I think some small number of students are ready for this, but I think much larger numbers of the students (and their parents) still see conformity and following as their core life concepts, and don't really want to be that independent. The adult curation involved in helping a student become self-directed is not small--speaking as the father of four adults who each had different proclivities toward being self-directed, but each of whom benefitted from years of help, conversations, support, encouragement, and challenging.
It might be really interesting to connect with Sugata Mitra, whose self-organized learning project from his TED prize money doesn't seem to have led to any larger movement toward self-direction. He might have some good perspective on this.
My take, instead, would be that it will be a combination of devoted parents and students, even small local coops, homeschool groups, and micro-schools, who will have to lead the charge for a larger change in public perception of where and how learning take place. It's so hard to predict how mass movements will take place and that the triggers will be, and/or what will become popular (which may not be at all what either you or I are thinking). But I do think we're likely to see lots of chaos as well as lots of people wanting to believe that they are going to be the ones to lead the charge into the next change--many of whom are in the existing system and wanting to maintain that centralized control, others who will be unrealistic in wanting the massive overnight adoption of auto-didactic learning by all, and other pragmatic entrepreneurs who have already built external learning opportunities that will bridge the gap (like Outschool).
So then the real question for me is: how do we / I help? If nobody has time or is listening to the conversations we're having, we're not in the "tide" of things, although it can be preparation for something in the future. To be in the "tide," though, doesn't always make sense because trends can be fleeting. It would be nice to find the place that is an overlap: what people would be really interested in hearing / seeing, and that also helps to make things better on a deeper level. Which is why I keep coming back to a YouTube / TV series on schools that are making a difference, or that are going through an "extreme school makeover."
OK, the more I have thought about this idea, the more I have liked it. I think we should do a mini-conference on this topic relatively soon. We should be thinking about speakers, and we should be thinking about diversity of speakers. Who really tells the story of the value of a teacher for you?
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I was browsing through the list of top EdWeek articles Steve mentioned in another post and noticed EdWeek has run a restart "Summit" already and has two more on the calendar.
Might be useful to look at how they are planning their events when developing The Indispensable Teacher event? Actual event format has some combination of presentation and moderated peer to peer conversations depending on which event you peruse... a lot of vendors in the mix ... familiar topics.
https://www.edweek.org/ew/events/education-week-online-summits.html...
I like Rebecca's idea of smaller groups. It could be organized in many different ways, which raises questions about tags and categories. Some examples:
And so on...
Set it up so that people have the chance to be in smaller cohorts and groups that act as support throughout the year:
1- Homeschooling teachings/Micro school teachers
2- In-person teachers
3- Hybrid teachers
4- Full Remote Learning teacher
For example, these are people that they can e-mail and share phone numbers. Create text groups. and then come back to the larger group and share their experiences so everyone is seeing different perspective and coming up with the ideas of education that are essential.
I think people use Facebook for this because it's so easy to do an so universal. We can easily set this up in Learning Revolution--what do we have that Facebook doesn't? What would make it worth coming here? Would it be the ability to schedule Zoom meetups for the support groups?
I guess we'll see! I want this to be true.
Yesterday, I wrote a summary analysis of the cohorts involved in our education system and came to the (not surprising) conclusion that there is no viable path for COVID-and-post success outside of the student-teacher relationship. Not the parents (who are not teachers, and cannot be expected to change that reality), not the school administrators (who must support the status quo in the midst of very complicated funding and governance relationships), and not the community (which is too vast, too disorganized, and too fragmented to bring about substantive, broad-based change). The key stakeholders are the students (who have ample time and curiosity, no love for much of curriculum, and for half of them, means to explore on their own via technology), and the teachers (who chose this career, and may be pleased by newfound freedom and dismissal of tests and other bothersome confections). So: it's all about the student-teacher relationship, the core of learning, the indispensible teacher, and building this parallel path so (a) it works for everyone, not just the fortunate and (b) we have something useful after the schools are unable to fulfill their mandate given their current tools, rules and resources.
There's an often-quoted conception in the homeschool world that it takes most students one month for each year of standard schooling to become accustomed to being in charge of their own education. Which is to say, the effects of conformity and having others direct you take a fair amount of time to recover from.
So this is where I take issue with your student-led change concept. I think some small number of students are ready for this, but I think much larger numbers of the students (and their parents) still see conformity and following as their core life concepts, and don't really want to be that independent. The adult curation involved in helping a student become self-directed is not small--speaking as the father of four adults who each had different proclivities toward being self-directed, but each of whom benefitted from years of help, conversations, support, encouragement, and challenging.
It might be really interesting to connect with Sugata Mitra, whose self-organized learning project from his TED prize money doesn't seem to have led to any larger movement toward self-direction. He might have some good perspective on this.
My take, instead, would be that it will be a combination of devoted parents and students, even small local coops, homeschool groups, and micro-schools, who will have to lead the charge for a larger change in public perception of where and how learning take place. It's so hard to predict how mass movements will take place and that the triggers will be, and/or what will become popular (which may not be at all what either you or I are thinking). But I do think we're likely to see lots of chaos as well as lots of people wanting to believe that they are going to be the ones to lead the charge into the next change--many of whom are in the existing system and wanting to maintain that centralized control, others who will be unrealistic in wanting the massive overnight adoption of auto-didactic learning by all, and other pragmatic entrepreneurs who have already built external learning opportunities that will bridge the gap (like Outschool).
So then the real question for me is: how do we / I help? If nobody has time or is listening to the conversations we're having, we're not in the "tide" of things, although it can be preparation for something in the future. To be in the "tide," though, doesn't always make sense because trends can be fleeting. It would be nice to find the place that is an overlap: what people would be really interested in hearing / seeing, and that also helps to make things better on a deeper level. Which is why I keep coming back to a YouTube / TV series on schools that are making a difference, or that are going through an "extreme school makeover."
OK, the more I have thought about this idea, the more I have liked it. I think we should do a mini-conference on this topic relatively soon. We should be thinking about speakers, and we should be thinking about diversity of speakers. Who really tells the story of the value of a teacher for you?
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